Rodney William Whitaker’s day job was teaching drama and film as chairman of the Department of Radio, TV and Film at the University of Texas, Austin, but like the characters of his books, that occupation hid a secret life.

Whitaker was unimpressed with the simplistic qualities of the spy fiction genre and wrote “The Eiger Sanction,” a novel about Jonathan Hemlock, an art-collecting, expert mountain-climbing, sexy college art professor who lived in a converted church and paid for his extraordinary art by working as an assassin for an unnamed top-secret U.S. government agency. He published the book under the pseudonym Trevanian, a name his wife, Diane, chose because of her admiration for the British political historian G.M. Trevelyn.

Published in 1972, the novel was an immediate success for the then-41-year-old professor. Critics grasped his intent and described it as “more intelligent, witty and stylish” than the James Bond novels it parodied.

It caught Clint Eastwood’s attention, and he directed and starred in a 1975 film that was not as successful. In a rare public acknowledgment of his relationship to Trevanian, Whitaker asked for a writing credit as Rod Whitaker.

Whitaker capitalized on the success and published another Hemlock novel, “The Loo Sanction,” in 1973. But, unlike other genre writers, he abandoned his character to pursue other projects both as Trevanian and under other pseudonyms.

He only acknowledged that he was Trevanian in a 1979 interview with Carol Lawson of The New York Times, after the release of “Shibumi,” saying, “Trevanian is going out of business. Now he can talk.” Until this interview there was speculation that Trevanian was a pen name for a group of authors or perhaps Robert Ludlum.

He told Lawson, “I write under five different names on several subjects — theology, law, aesthetics, film — and want to keep my readerships separate.” His other known pen names were Nicholas Seare, Benat LeCagnat and Edoard Moran, but there could have been others.

Under his own name he wrote books in his academic area of expertise, including “The Language of Film” in 1970. Otherwise, he was jealous of his privacy, and his publisher sometimes sent stand-ins for appearances.

He was an author who stretched his talents, and both readers and critics appreciated the risks. As The Washington Post wrote in a review of “The Summer of Katya,” Trevanian’s return from “retirement” in 1983, his books have “a consistently high level of craftsmanship, a certain playfulness of style and a pervasive message that things are not what they seem.”

Whitaker requited his readers’ appreciation in a 1998 Newsweek interview: “The Trevanian buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one.”

With his financial success, Whitaker moved to the Basque region of Spain. He died Dec. 14, 2005, in England.